In November 1991 some guests at a game lodge in the Timbavati region
of South Africa became stranded at night in the bush, deep in lion country.
The Land Rover driven by their guide was lodged in a ditch with a broken
steering column. Around them it was pitch dark and the presence of lions,
animals who see perfectly in the dark, was announced by ominous growls.
With several tawny lions situated near the vehicle, the primal terror
of being eaten by a predator gripped the group and paralyzed them with
fear.

Then, suddenly, human figures emerged out of the darkness – a
native woman of an advanced age with a baby on her back, a young girl
around ten, and a slightly older boy. Walking in a slow, trance-like
state and keeping closely together, they made their way between the pack
of lions that had gathered around the Land Rover. One of the stranded
group ventured to exit the shelter of the vehicle. He and the young boy
then departed for camp to find a rescue vehicle, while the woman with
the baby and the young girl stayed close to the others. The rescue took
place in a kind of dreamlike calm, largely due to the serene, commanding
attitude of the black woman.

The group later learned that the woman had been able to walk safely
among the agitated lions because she went into twasa, shamanic trance.

Endangered Species

Linda Tucker, one of the people rescued that evening, has written a
wonderful book, destined to become a classic on interspecies communication
that will rank with he works of Farley Mowatt,
Jane Goodall, and Barry Lopez. Subsequent to that adventure, Tucker became
a student of Sangaan shaman
Maria
Khosa,
the
woman who saved
the
group, and later, of Credo Mutwa, the well-known Zulu shaman who advised
John Mack (Passport to the Cosmos) on predation by alien entities.
In a spiritual journey of ten years, Linda Tucker acquired a working
knowledge
of lion shamanism known only to a handful of people in Africa. Mystery
of the White Lions is both an account of her personal quest and
the record of a precious legacy that belongs to all humankind.

If her
discoveries are anywhere close to the truth, the fate of the
white lions may reflect, or even determine, the fate of another endangered
species: humanity.

Linda Tucker was educated in Cape Town and Cambridge, England, where
she majored in Jungian psychology and medieval symbolism. In 2002 she
founded the Global White Lion Protection Trust to preserve white lions
and the race shamanic cultural wisdom connected to them.
The address of the Trust: http://www.whitelion.co.za.
Their contact address is: whitelion@zamail.co.za

The Lion Identity

Mystery of the White Lions is a book of many revelations, on many levels.
First and foremost, it is the compelling story of a rare genetic anomaly,
blue-eyed and amber-eyed lions who are genuinely white, not albinos.
It appears that the white lion cannot be a chance mutation, otherwise
it would have spread regionally, which it has not. These specimens
remain confined to the sacred region of Timbavati. In their case, the
white recessive gene does not produce albinos and may involve a distinct
set of feline genes not yet understood. (Tucker, p. 133ff, interview
with geneticist Ted Sohn) The “very rare and novel set of mutations” required
to produce the white lions awaits a scientific explanation, but a shamanic
legend recounted by Credo Mutwa provides an explanation of sorts.

Although
the first sighting of a white lion by a European witness occurred in
1938, the Zulu shaman relates their appearance to the fall of a meteor
in Timbavati around 1600. Around that time natives observed that “all
the animals that stayed within that area where the mysterious object
had settled on the ground were giving birth to snow-white offspring” (p.
132). Are these snow-white, amber-eyed felines the result of a chance
mutation produced by the meteoric fall? Or are they an emissary from
the starry realms sent to guide humanity as it plunges toward the verge
of extinction, as Linda Tucker comes to believe?

As Her quest unfolds, Tucker realizes that the identity of the white
lions carries an evolutionary lesson that stretches far back into the
past and ahead into the future: “This unique lion strain declared
itself some four hundred years ago in this precise spot on the globe
as precursors of a new epoch” (p. 135). Their identity cannot be
understood apart from the place where they appear. Timbavati, which means “the
place of coming down to the ground,” was a sacred site for the
black natives long before it was declared a game preserve by white South
African president Paul Kruger. Sangaan shamans known for their expertise
in lion lore traditionally forbade hunting in the Timbavati area.
Credo Mutva,
a shaman of mixed Zulu and Bushman heritage, taught Linda Tucker that
the white lions of Timbavati carry the eternal essence of native African
wisdom and a message of crucial importance for all humanity. The purpose
of Tucker’s book is to convey that message, to the best of her
understanding.

Interspecies Contract

“The real art of shamanism is the respectful exchange between
two species” (p. 295).

Timbavati lies on a great meridian, a line running north-south from
pole to pole, but not just any great meridian. It occupies the Nilotic
meridian (31 East longitude) which runs through the Giza plateau where,
in times of undetermined antiquity, a massive stone lion was carved:
the Sphinx. Tucker points out that the Nile is the only great river in
the world that runs due north, and it does so in a straight line, corresponding
to the geographical meridian. Southward into the depths of Africa, the
meridian passes through Laetoli, Tanzania, and the ruins of Great Zimbabwe,
a massive megalithic site associated with lion lore. At its terminus,
it reaches the Sterkfontein caves of South Africa, not far from where
the
white
lions
have appeared.
The Nilotic meridian is connected with the most important sites of archeological
discovery concerning the current theory of human evolution.

Leotoli and the Olduvai Gorge where the primate skeleton called Lucy
was discovered lie in the Rift Valley, a massive landseam formed
by seismic upheavals in the earth’s mantle. Following shamanic
lore imparted to her by Credo Mutwa, Tucker suggests that the phenomenon
of
the white
lions is deeply related with what we know, and have yet to lean, about
the origins of our own species and our survival over the long term. She
connects the Nilotic meridian with the Zulu legend of an underground
stream corresponding to the Nile that runs all the way to the tip of
Africa, and this in turn with the reversal of the North-South magnetism
of the Earth, immanently due to reverse its poles, if scientists and
geologists are not mistaken. Tucker speculates:

Given that virtually all our great hominid sites have been found near,
or in, this erupting continental seam, the question arises: Might the
rifting process itself, or rather the seismic energies operative in this
fault line, be considered factors prompting genetic mutations- the adaptations
that also led to the modern human line? (p. 274)

Here, as in several other points in the book, the author is stretching
her thesis to the max, and the connections she strings together risk
credulity - but like the taut string of a lute, what resonance she produces.
The impact of her book lies as much in this resonance as in the vivid
and detailed information she packs into it.

At Sterkfontain near Timbavati archeologists have found an unusual
number of austropithecine fossils showing signs of violent death, possibly
by animal predators. Australopithicus is the name for a hominid or proto-human
animal thought to have lived as long ago as 2.5 million years, during
a massive glaciation. Tucker carefully considers the archeological and
anthropological evidence suggesting that hominids lived in close proximity
with Dinofelis, the long extinct sabre-toothed tiger. She relates
an arresting thought of travel writer Bruce Chatwin, who wondered if “Dinofelis
was a specialist predator on the primates” (p. 77). In the complex
picture she draws, the sabre-toothed tiger emerges as an ally to the
human species who preyed on hominids, yes, but also allowed humans to
become predators themselves.

What Tucker calls the “hominide-Dinofelis hypothesis” involves
a human-lion contract that afforded a huge evolutionary leap for our
species, because it enabled us to become meat-eaters. Without exception,
current
theories of evolution based on African archeology assume that humans
learned to hunt by necessity and purely by trial-and-error, but Tucker’s
hypothesis, closely supported by the shamanic teachings of Credo Mutwa,
suggests that we became meat-eaters by a sacred contract with a lion
species,
Dinofelis.

In support of her case, Tucker presents Bushman rock paintings showing
human-feline interactions. Credo Mutwa told her that these paintings “act
as a visual counterpart to the ancient memory carried by African initiates” (p.
91) The carvings do not show fanciful events, or even symbolic events,
but they are detailed depictions of crucial moments of human-animal exchange.
Among these moments, one of the most decisive was when humans took on
the role of predators and killed the very animals that had previously
preyed on them. The sacred contract behind predation was violated when
human beings exceeded the proper bounds of the kill. Our excessive consumption “desecrates
natural law,” Tucker says, and because we allowed ourselves to
become excessive in predation on other animals, we do the same in every
area of life (p. 299). She believes that the white lions have returned
to remind us of the predator-prey contract and bring us to our senses,
thus saving us from our own mad excess.

Hunting Mythology

For the people of Africa, the skies are full of life; yes, even the
origin of life may be attributed to the stars! For the African mind,
the living animals of the Serengeti plains are reflections of their heavenly
cousins. The herds of Eternity are really in the stars; there also is
to be found the origin and destiny of humanity. (p. 279)

The hominid-Dinofelis hypothesis is one of the richest, most carefully
argued themes in Mystery of the White Lions. In a series of
brilliant metaphoric links, Tucker weaves her anthropological argument
with mythological
lore from Africa and elsewhere in the world. Early in the book she points
out that the Great Goddess in many cultures is associated with lions.
Atamgatis, Cybele, and Rhea are among the Near Eastern goddesses shown
flanked by
lions. In Germanic lore, Freya rides a great cat, and her Babylonian
counterpart, Ishtar, does the same. In Japan, the mother of the Buddhas,
Monjubosatsu, also rides a lion. In Buddhism, the lion’s roar denotes
the ultimate realization of enlightenment. The Egyptian divinities Shu
and Tefnut are born as lion cubs. Also in Egyptian myth, the lion goddess
Sekmet destroys humanity when it has become too degenerated to partake
of the miracle of all sentient life.

Credo Mutwa adds oral African lore to the comparative evidence:

The Earth Mother asked the Exiled Lion, Imbudebingile, to send down
great carnivores to the earth – lions, leopards and wild cats – to
protect humankind from negative entities. Man was too scared to live
with the lions, so he chose the wild cats to tame and live with him in
his houses. (p. 212)

The "Exiled Lion" in this legend is the constellation of Leo. African
shamanism is replete with star lore relating the various species of animals
to different zones of the Zodiac, but the Leonine star-pattern is paramount. “We
are told that the lions came from the sky-lion constellation,” the
shaman told Linda Tucker. All through her book, she interweaves the stellar
motif with the other elements of her argument.

The constellation lore of the white lions is closely associated with
Orion, the Hunter, known as Matseing to the Bushman. In Greek myth, Orion
was condemned by Artemis, the goddess who guarded non-human animal life
on earth, for exceeding the quota allowed for his kill. Tucker does not
relate this mythic anecdote, but it fits beautifully into her thesis
about humanity’s unrestricted consumption of nature due to breaking
the prey-predator contract. The lesson here is: without reverence for
the interspecies bond, our species cannot keep to to its proper boundaries
in the natural world.

The Great Memory

In a fascinating twist, Tucker connects the appearance of the white
lions of Simbavati to the possibility of an Ice Age. Far back in prehistory,
hominids may have cohabited in caves with lions during glaciations. In
the near future we may need to heed the presence of the white lions to
understand massive global changes that now face the human species. Tucker
proposes the idea that “a unique white gene might make an appearance
in anticipation of a radical climatic change,” and indeed, “in
respect of Mutwa’s view of the White Lions as prophetic messengers,
this makes absolute sense” (p. 288).

She points out that in Zodiacal
terms we are in fact entering the Age of Leo, and with a shift in the
cosmic timeframe we could be facing massive Earth changes. Her chapter
entitled “Ice Ages and Snow Lions” contains far-reaching
speculations about this prospect, again stretching her argument to its
limits. Yet there remains something irrefutably right about the direction
she is takng with her speculations (if one can call them that). The sweep
of associations she invokes is truly huge. It seems that we must understand
the while lions in a cosmic perspective, or not at all. Tucker cites
Laurens Van der Post on the skylore of the Kalahari Bushmen for whom
"the song of the stars is cosmic language" (p. 210). In The
Lost World of the Kalahari, Van der Post proposed the term "Great Memory" for the
capacity of indigenous peoples to remember events in the life of the
human species. Credo Mutwa uses the equivalent term "shamanic recall."
(I proposed these term in Sharing the Gaia Mythos, before encountering
it in Tucker's book.)

Van de Post said that the Great Memory involves more than the oral
tradition of story-telling, which is a cultural outgrowth of it. It is
a shamanic faculty "synonymous with a heightened, or deepened level of
consciousnesss"
(72). "Heightened awareness" was the term introduced
by Carlos Castaneda the paranormal perception in shamanic states. It
is worth noting as well that one of Castaneda's early shamanic tests
involved an encounter with a saber-toothed tiger. The Great Memory belongs
to the entire human species, but it only becomes active in the special
case of shamans who explore paranormal states of awareness. Yet Tucker's
book
suggests
that
the Great memory may also be realized more universally whenever the interspecies
bond is honored.

Mystery of the White Lions is not just another book on interspecies
bonding: it is an interspecies revelation.

Canned Lions

In addition to its sublime moments, which are rich and varied, Tucker's
book carries some gruesome material. We learn that the cause of the white
lions has become known globally through the glitzy Las Vegas burlesque
of animal trainers Siegfried and Roy. The brutal truth is, no white lions
today live free in the wild. They are raised in captivity under the risk
of being marketed as "canned lions," the vulgar term for lions bred to
be hunted and killed under closely controlled conditions - a commercial
parody of the sacred hunt. So far one white lion has been killed in this
way, as a trophy. Needless to day, this is a magnificent trophy animal
that commands a heady price because its rarity. The breeding of future
white lions may depend fate on those few animals now living in Timbavati,
because the price they command as trophies can pay for the cost of raising
them. How's that for a paradox?

Linda Tucker believes that the current situation of the white
lions is exemplary: the choice we make regarding them is
the choice we
make about
ourselves. The dilemma of their survival is comparable to our
own: life is nothing but commerce. The way we treat them represents
our judgement
on ourselves as a species. Is this
true or not?
Read her
book
, dip into the mystery, and decide
for yourself.

Linda Tucker and White Lion Konkoela

jll: Flanders NOV 2005

Scientists cannot explain how this genetic variation arises, or why
white lions should appear at this time, but Tucker provides some fascinating
leads.